Page 38 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded

There was a faint rustling sound. A gentle thump. “I’m going to put my hand on your shoulder,” Dax said. “Is that okay?”

I managed to nod just a little. I felt the soft weight of his hand, and the warmth of him.

“You’re safe now. Everything is okay. Can you take a deep breath?”

I tried, surprised to find my lungs looser now. The air no longer contained the acrid sting of smoke and sulphur.

“That’s very good. And again. In… and out. Now I’m going to put my hand on yours. Is that okay?”

I nodded, feeling his hand slide down my arm to land with his fingers over mine.

“Can you open your hand for me?”

I did, surprised to hear something solid drop to the floor.

“That’s very good,” Dax said. “You’re going to be fine. Take another deep breath for me.”

I did, and then opened my eyes… When had I closed them? We were sitting at the side of the community centre room, my back against the wall. The lights were off, the room illuminateddimly by a handful of blue emergency exit signs. The object I’d just dropped was still sitting at my feet, and I realised it was the walking stick belonging to the human woman. I must have grabbed it from where it had been set against the wall, while she was exercising.

“Everyone else is waiting in the reception area,” Dax told me. “There’s no rush. You can take your time.”

I was too numb to be terribly concerned about whether I was inconveniencing the class. My heart rate was finally slowing down, the images of Ixralia still lurking in the back of my mind. “What happened?” I asked eventually.

“Dala knocked over a couple of the storage crates,” Dax said, pointing to the rear of the room. There were a dozen or so crates in neat stacks, and sure enough, the stack at the end of the row had been knocked over. “The noise startled you.”

Startled? Yeah, that was the understatement of the century. I wasn’t quite clear on who Dala was, but it didn’t really matter in the end. There had been a loud noise and I’d had the mother of all flashbacks.

A click and a rattle sounded from across the room, and I looked up to see Rolen step through the door. He stopped just inside, seeming to wait for permission to come closer.

“Do you want to talk to him?” Dax asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, not because I actually wanted to, but because I couldn’t see any real way to avoid it. Dax waved him over, and Rolen approached slowly, leaving plenty of space between us. “Sorry,” I said, though the apology was probably insufficient for having disrupted his entire class – and quite possibly threatened a few of his clients.

“There’s nothing to apologise for,” he said. “You’re not the first person to have a panic attack in my class. And you won’t be the last. There’s a reason we hold separate classes for traumasurvivors. And everyone else knows what this is like. They’ve all got their own stories to tell.”

I scowled at that. “Somehow I doubt there’s much comparison between their stories and mine.” I knew for a fact that none of the other participants were ex-military. And that meant they’d likely never left the planet. Getting hit by a car, or burned in a house fire was horrible, but it really couldn’t compare to being stranded on a remote planet and tortured by demonic creatures.

Rolen didn’t respond to that one, and somehow, that annoyed me more. “There’s an office off the reception area, if you’d like somewhere quiet to sit for a while?” he said. “I’m going to spend about ten minutes wrapping up the class. Or you can just go home, if you’d prefer? It’s entirely up to you.”

I wanted to go home. No, scratch that, I wanted tobeat home. But the getting there was going to be a problem. “I think I’ll sit in the office for a bit,” I told him. Then I spotted the walking stick again. “Uh… Can you apologise to…” What was the woman’s name?

“Emily,” Rolen filled in. “Yes, I will.”

Holding onto Dax to steady myself, I stood up, following him across the room and through the door into the office. Thankfully, there was a door directly from the main hall, so we didn’t have to go through reception, where everyone else was waiting.

I sank into a chair, resting my head in my hands and my elbows on my knees, while Dax stood patiently by the wall. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, after a few minutes.

“You can figure out how we’re going to get home without me doing that again,” I muttered at the floor. “I don’t want to be having flashbacks on a crowded train.”

“We’ll take it slowly,” he said, sounding surprisingly calm about the whole thing. “You can stay behind me, and if you needto stop and take a break at any point, I’ll find somewhere quiet for us to sit.”

I blinked at him, not quite sure what to make of this sudden take-charge attitude. This morning, he’d been prostrating himself on the floor and panicking about having had a wet dream, terrified of my displeasure. But here he was, making decisions, ordering other people about, and presenting himself as a rock for me to lean on, unfazed by his master well and truly losing his shit. It seemed I had seriously underestimated Dax.

And that was… very interesting. Today had proven exactly two things to me. Firstly, that I was completely incapable of running my own life and taking care of myself. Right now, I couldn’t even remember how to get back to the train station, and left to my own devices, I’d probably spend the rest of the day wandering aimlessly in circles. And secondly, Dax was far more qualified to be taking control of the finer details of my life than I had ever imagined.

Maybe Aiden had been right all along. Maybe I just needed to give Dax a chance. And then maybe the rest of this mountain I had to climb wouldn’t seem so scary after all.

CHAPTER NINETEEN